6th Annual Trip with the Boys - Paudash Lake & The Duke

A few buddies and I have two annual trips that we take.. we leave the wives at home and take 3 days or so to do some fishing on various lakes and cottages in Ontario.

This year the trip was to Paudash Lake in the Bancrfot area and we stayed at Anchorage resort, a nice collection of cottages about 15 minutes outside of Bancroft. The cottages have everything you need to get you by over the course of a weekend. this includes a BBQ and a fire pit

for the 4 of us we decided to take two boats and have 3 single day tournaments switching up partners each day. This was a lot fun and Im happy to say I was on the winning team on both day 1 and day 2.

(my little guy was not in the running for big fish)

For those not familiar with Paudash lake, the lake is broken into two sides divided by a bridge and it contains 4 (or so) large bays. Pinpointing active fish was not problem as each bay had a healthy crop of year 1 and year 2 bass. The problem we had was finding the elusive "dukers" as one of my buddies calls them.

(Brad showing off why they may be small, but mighty!)

When we asked around on where to fish and what works, we got a variety of answers.. one that came up often was "laydowns" or fallen trees. By the end of the weekend we realized why the locals were so quick to give this info up.. this lake is nothing but "laydowms", they might as well have told us to "fish in the water" it would have been just as help full.

(Aaron starts off the trip with a nice 3lber)

All joking aside we came across a few patterns that worked well, and had a great time on the water. We each caught a ton of fish, and will be sure to head back to Paudash in the future. I know I will need to stock up on my plastics before I head out as I burnt through a couple pack of soft bodied frogs on the first day. the fish may be small but they are mean

We moved around and fished well over 80% of the lake in our 3 days on Paudash. Many fish were caught and all were released. The high point of the trip was this 5.22lb largemouth caught by "Kenny" on day 2 of our trip. In case you missed the pic of it above (yeah right) here is another view of a hawg by any ones standards.

(Kenny with the "Duke")

Weapons:

Dobyns 335C/Shimano Curado/Gene Larew Three Legged Frog
Dobyns 805CBRM/Shimano Curado/Baby BrushHawg
Dobyns DX703SF/Shimano Stradic/Tubes